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The Internet has revolutionized computers, technology and mass communication like nothing before. In order to understand how we got this far, we have to come back to early 1960s , when everything begun.

During the Cold War, in 1957, the first satellite Sputnik has launched into space by Soviet Union. The USA were in shocked by this news. As the direct response to Sputnik’s launch, they created Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). It changed everything.

In that time computers were massive, filled entire rooms and needed to be keep into cold places. They were able to do only one task at the time, and was no way to network them together. It was quite ineffective and uncomfortable. ARPA helped to network them together and turned itself into ARPANet.  Without ARPANet we wouldn’t be able to use the Internet as we know now. Furthermore, The Internet wouldn’t exist at all!!

Little by little, people have developed ARPANet and progressively reached more and more goals. In my opinion, one of the most important goal was innovation the network navigation system – the World Wide Web. Thanks to WWW the Internet become more accessible. At the beginning, only the military and government were able to use the Internet. When WWW popped out. the ordinary people could start to connect their computers to the Internet.

What was the more interesting for me, is the fact that id Soviet Union and the USA weren’t the enemy combats, our network’s adventure would have never happened!!!!

 

 

Blog Post #1

The history of the Internet was extremely complex. It is interesting to focus not only on a technological timeline but the people who took part in developing it and their objectives. Whilst reading “Misunderstanding of media” by James Curran, I found it very interesting how diverse those incentives actually were. 

Development of the Internet was at first fuelled by military purposes during the Cold War. The United States needed to develop better technology than Russia as to prevent a nuclear attack from their side. 

Academics wanted to use the technology as a research instrument in order to encourage scientific advance. However the access would remain exclusive to the experts and not open to the masses.

The change that intrigues me the most, came in the 1980s, when online services opened the internet to the public. This encouraged emergence of platforms like ‘The WELL’ (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link). It brought together social and political activists and enthusiasts of all kinds as it was a platform where they could engage in various kinds of discussions.

Its aim, for the first time, was to promote the idea of fellowship and empathy. Some users wanted to be liberated from a “repressive convention”, others wanted to give the power to the public and alter the society. Adventure games that emerged in the 1990s gave people freedom to adapt an identity and break free from troubles of everyday life and as a result, get to experiment with their real identities without the constraints of race, gender or class.

It is amazing how a military and research instrument became a place where we can now share opinions, discuss and express ourselves. Activists changed the idea of the Internet in the way it could create virtual community, entertainment, and more importantly it became an “agency of democracy”. The Internet was freed from its practical aim and could actually work in favor of the society.

The important question now is how an invention that originated from purposes of war inspired Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, to create it on the basis of giving an access to a public good and bringing people together? (Curran et al., 2012)

Military Network to Public Sphere

When you think about the history of the internet most people think about moments such as Tim Berners-Lee inventing the World Wide Web in 1989 and the origin of your favourite social networking site. However, something that most people don’t realise is the impact thenMilitary had. This is because of how different the purpose the military had for the internet were compared to how we use the internet now. This transformation is what I find most interesting.

The internet is a global phenomenon used by over 3 billion people in the world, but when the Military created the first computer network that was not the intention of it. The purpose was to allow communication between several research facilities while making sure that if one of the facilities was destroyed by an attack from Russia then the network was still able to run. They intended to keep it as a secure military operation. So why is the internet now accessible to so many different people?

This was down to two other important cultures: scientists and hippies. Scientists and other major research facilities such as universities that could gather enough funding started to branch out and set up their own computer networks. This moved the internet on from being a sole military use to an educational one too. The biggest move forward, however, was the one that the Hippies started. The hippies decided that they wanted the internet to be something all of the public could use and, therefore, become a public sphere. Working with scientists, in Californian, they managed to create a computer networking system for the public this was called the WELL. That was the first step to the internet becoming as accessible to the general public as it is today.

There is still a long way to go until the internet is completely available to everyone, but with the new advancements such as Facebook, launching drones to provide the internet to remote areas maybe it will be sooner than we think.

Blog Post 1- The History of the Internet: Ease of access to information.

The internet has evolved vastly in its short life to now becoming a part of daily lives aiding us where ever we need information. Even university life has become much easier with the internet, from the ability to check timetables to even handing in coursework electronically (like I am doing now).

I had an interesting conversation with an uncle while researching for last week’s presentation and talked about his time at university in the early 80’s. Studying computer engineering, research was necessary to find out if anyone else in the world was doing similar projects for his dissertations, this would be where I could simply go into Google and research this. Being the 80’s however and the internet still being in its early days, a search on JANET (Joint Academic Net) would take a week to conduct and cost around £80 to do, this would only yield a simple list of names and details on projects meaning further searches were required to make contact with overseas institutions.

Looking at this in comparison to research any student can now do electronically for an essay seems a piece of cake. I guess this ease of information made possible by search engines like Google has helped expand once restricted knowledge to vast numbers of people needing or wanting it.

History of the Internet- How far have we come?

In 1969 when man took the first step on the moon, four American universities during the very same year came together to participate on a project coined as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).  These four institutes, built the first successful computer network.  In the age when computers were bulky, inconvenient, and not very user friendly, they had created the foundation of something, much bigger and broader than any of them could have ever imagined – ‘The Internet’.

At the time the founding members of these institutions didn’t even realise, the value of their modest yet significant creation. In an attempt to establish a connection between each other, they laid the foundation for something that would evolve into a enormous global grid. A grid that would connect 3 billion people (40% of the human population) as of 2015, giving birth to a whole new technologically transformed society.

According to an article by the New York Times (2014), The Internet has “become so much a part of how we live, that few recall what life was like without it.” This article also highlights the sacrifices we, as users have to make, in order to be connected via ‘The Internet’. This brings me to my question, that despite achieving so much in such a short span of time, has ‘The Internet’ deviated from its original purpose? Has the platform which once acted as the guarantor of free expression for the people, just become one of the numerous things that the government controls now, threatening everything this network originally stood for?

Even though we continue to rapidly move forward, we need to take a step back and think, about what The Internet really stands for in today’s changing times?

Blog Post 1- History of the Internet

It is really hard to decide what could be the most interesting or surprising thing about the internet because it is so vast and it develops so quickly. I think it is important to try and have a look at the history of the internet in order to see where did it come from and what it really is but also how people made use of it in the past.

One part of the internet that I find really interesting is the email, developed for the first time in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. Emails are basically instant messages that connect people around the world through the internet. Even if Facebook or other services are in full swing today and they make communication much easier and quicker, I still find the email to be an amazing invention.

I am a Journalism student and for me the internet plays a huge role in my studies as my course is encouraging us not to focus just on the traditional industry but also on writing stories online or using Facebook or Twitter to engage with your audience. This means that the internet is allowing me to do what I like without having to work for a magazine or a newspaper. I can just open up a blog and write my own pieces.

Development of commercial technology of surveillance

The Internet, as we know, was a product of cold war. Initially it was a research tool linked to a military purpose-designed to survive a nuclear attack. Then it started to expand and was used for scientific research and development, which then soon became accessible to the public.

What interested me about the history of Internet was commercialization of the Internet in 1995. Which brings us to the idea Surveillance. The basic motive behind the idea of surveillance is to monitor data and traffic over a network in a form that tracks user, gathers information about which websites are visited and what users do on these websites. Certainly, this idea benefits the advertisers and companies and helps them increase their sale. This soon became problem for the users.

Surveillance, what we understand now, is monitoring our every move and keeping a track of all our activities. The government, the police and other agencies have access to all our personal data, phone bills, our chat and conversations. This allows them to recognize any threat, prevent and investigate criminal activities. Although, this has helped avert danger and threat, it has also taken away the sense of freedom from the user, which was the one of the main purposes of using social media and Internet.

 

 

Blog Post 1- The History of the Internet:Wi-Fi

Nowadays, it is hard to find someone who doesn’t know what the Internet is and how to use this global network. The history of the Internet is revolutionary and the genius Stephen Hawking quotes: “We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.”

Over the past ten years, the Internet has evolved from the conventional way of sharing information and data to the number one mass media platform. On the daily basis, people are using the Internet for different purposes such as communication, entertainment, business and purchase of goods and services.

What I found interesting about the history of the internet is the development of the Wi-Fi. Today, you can be online anywhere outside your home, in the restaurant, in the shopping mall, in the cinema and without physically having your phone connected to the cable. It should be noted that before gaining international recognition this famous wireless technology had to fight for its place in the market. History says that the first Wi-Fi has been applied in the Netherlands in the beginning of the 90s. In 1997 the first modification of 802.11 standard appeared. In a couple of years all the manufacturers and developers of hardware: 3Com, Cisco, Nokia, Symbol Technologies and others had officially registered the new technology under the brand name “ Wi-Fi ” .

Blog post 1 – Ever growing global platform

An interesting thing about the development of internet from then and now is how something that was created for a specific niche group almost 50 years ago, become such a global sensation that audiences everywhere depend on greatly.

The simple fact that it was inspired during and post the Cold War. At times like that, you wouldn’t think it would be a priority to begin to develop new features such as the Arpanet and other objects which are now everyday appliances that we take for granted. The internet really began as a necessity, to enable the exchange of information to military ships but now, it is a necessity for no more than our pure entertainment; although we do use it educationally, for example, I greatly depend on it for global news and contacting people that help me in my degree but for my brother, who spends his days talking to strangers worldwide on his game console through the internet, it is what he is used to and has become complicit; he doesn’t nor do I think he will really understand the power it has.

I studied media in depth which enabled me to really understand globalisation of the media industry and how it affects us as consumers. The internet has converted this planet into what is considered a ‘global village’ (McLuhan) where we are all interconnected worldwide with the removal of time and space. This really fascinates me how, although not all the world has access to the internet (only 42% actually have access to broadband) we are all connected over this ever growing platform that essentially none of us really understand. This growth has caused for new creations such as the iPhones in 2007 which is just making it easier for us to indulge in this platform and lose ourselves – not good.

Blog Post 1 – The History of the Internet

The impact of the Internet on modern day society in undeniably significant. Analysing the history of what we now know today as the Internet reveals a revolutionary journey dating back to WWII. One of the most interesting things I learned was how connections between computers developed to create a network non-reliant on one central point (server). This decentralisation, alongside the invention of packet switching, paved the way for Internet protocol, allowing users to send and receive information through this interconnected network of networks. The World Wide Web would simply not function without these core capabilities.

Additionally, I am particularly fascinated with how this technology, and particularly the Internet, found it’s way into everyone’s homes. With the help of the Microchip, developed in the 1970s, computers and other Internet-connected devices became personal computers, rather than bulky machines that fill an entire room. This meant more and more people had convenient access to devices wielding web browsers and other software that utilised these networks teaming largely with freely accessible information. Power to the people? Or just a way in which the government and big corporations can spy on us? Either way, 40.4% (2014) of the world’s population are now on the internet, partially thanks to these historic technological milestones.

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P.S. Anyone looking to further their knowledge in this field might want to visit The National Museum of Computing situated at Bletchley Park. I went their in October last year and it was very interesting and relevant to this topic. You can even see Colossus and the world’s oldest working computer! http://www.tnmoc.org/